5.0 out of 5 Most impressively and importantly for those of us involved in training-teaching-learning, Lankes never loses sight of the important role he plays for his readers—the role of someone who makes information meaningful to those of us receiving it through the book.

16 years ago today my father died. I think of him often, and miss his wit and guidance. It is also not lost on me that he was just about 10 years older than me now when he died. As I grow older, I remember him and our time together differently. There is a nuance where I am either understanding our time together differently, or I am simply projecting my own time as a father into his actions.

As a bit of a remembrance of dad, I’m posting another excerpt from my new book The Boring Patient. It is the first time that I have really written about my dad and his passing. I also think that my father, as the consummate salesmen, would appreciate me using his memory to drum up sales.

The Family

Once my medical team suspected cancer my wife called my mother to tell her the news. My mother, who lives in Ohio, was in a car in Tennessee on her way to Florida when she got the call. She found the closest airport and flew to Syracuse the next day to be with me and help out at home.

It took me a few days to truly understand the depth of my mother’s concern. Somehow in my 40s I had forgotten that I was still her son. If my son was diagnosed with cancer you better believe I would be in that hospital room. My mom was there for the first chemo, and she was there when we had to tell my two sons what was going on. In a way my father was there too, even though he had died over 15 years ago at just 55 years old.

I was at my father’s bedside when he died. He had gone to the hospital complaining of abdominal pain. He had a gallstone (thanks genetics). Normally, as I have said, this is painful, but not dangerous. Your liver makes bile, a soup to help you digest fats, and stores it in the gallbladder, which spits it into your small intestines via the bile duct when you eat. A gallstone is when some of this soup hardens sitting around in the gallbladder. If that “stone” finds its way to the bile duct and gets stuck? Ouch!

In a small part of the population the bile duct joins up with something called the pancreatic duct before it joins the intestines. The pancreatic duct delivers digestive juices (technical term) into the small intestines. The problem is if a gallstone stops up a joint duct like this, particularly just after you have eaten: not only do you get the pain of a backed-up gallbladder, the pancreatic juices also back up into the pancreas, causing acute pancreatitis. There is no elegant way to put this: the pancreas begins to digest itself. If this can’t be controlled, these juices begin leaking out of the pancreas and this leads to organ failure. My father was part of that unlucky population.

I was 28 when this happened. I still think about my father every day. By the time I got home to be with him the doctors had put my father into an induced coma for the pain. He never woke up. He died surrounded by my mother and me and some friends. As we told stories and laughed celebrating his life his vital functions slowed. At the moment his heart stopped a doctor and nurse rushed into the room to revive him. However, he wanted no “heroic measures,” and his doctors had made it very clear that they had done everything that could be done and there was no chance for recovery. So my mother, with a strength I cannot fathom, stayed the hands of the doctor.

I would note, however, that his heart, an organ that he had struggled with (a quadruple bypass, multiple stents, and endless battles over smoking and a bad diet) was the last thing to go. “Listen son, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” he would say as he downed a fried baloney sandwich. After his bypass he had me bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to his hospital room. I believe it was my father’s final “screw you” to the doctors that the heart went last. He was a man with a great sense of humor so I wouldn’t put it past him.

My father’s death made me (and still makes me) think a lot about my kids and being left fatherless. I have two sons that my dad never got to meet. Riley was 12 when I was diagnosed. Andrew was 9.

There was not much debate between my wife and me when it came to informing the kids. Be open and honest and ready to answer all their questions. I don’t think the idea of hiding my condition from my kids ever really occurred to us. Yet, I have had several folks tell me about having a parent die of cancer, and never being told what was going on. They told me they are still dealing with that as an adult. We didn’t want that.

For Andrew the talk was relatively easy. Daddy is sick. He has cancer. He will be tired and probably lose his hair. Andrew didn’t really have a grasp on death and such, so to him, it was just some more information. “Can I get ice cream now?”

Riley’s talk was tougher. There are way too many ways in which my eldest son is like me. One way that was evident during this conversation was using humor to mask our emotions and/or break the stress. With every bit of information he made a joke while clearly tearing up. Finally, at the end he said, “Yeah, but it’s not like you’re going to die.”

“Actually son, yes, I could die.” May you never have to say those words to your child.

The only thing that saved me from breaking down at that point was having my wife and mom in the room. “But grandma had cancer, and she’s fine. Uncle Joe had cancer, and he’s fine.” Never mind that he remembered Joanne who had died from cancer, and his good friend’s mother. Riley is smart. Riley knew the possibilities. Later, however, Riley would also be the first to make jokes about my lack of eyebrows and hair. All of Riley is smart, including his ass.

You can read more about my family and our trip through cancer in The Boring Patient, now on sale.

The following is information about my new book, but I wanted to start out with a thank you to the readers of this blog. Thank you for all your support through my cancer journey. Thank you for your input and ideas on the book and the encouragement to write it up. If you read my cancer posts you have a sense of the tone and humor in the book. However, the book is much more than just a compilation of blog posts. It tells my story, and speaks directly to caregivers and medical professionals. It also has my standard rants, jokes, and sermons. I hope you enjoy the book.

To my librarian friends, I need your help. Please help me get out the word on the book. Let’s show the world that librarians and libraries are indeed friends to authors.

Now available:

This book is not about cancer. It is about how David Lankes, professor and father, responded to being diagnosed, living with, and being treated for cancer. That is an important distinction because cancer is not funny. Cancer sucks. Cancer does not teach, cancer does not preach, cancer does not comfort, or inspire, or inform. Cancer kills. How one responds to cancer? That is a completely different matter.

In this cross between memoir, case study, and a lecture, Lankes takes the reader on a humor ladened trip through a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis, chemotherapy, and ultimately a bone marrow transplant (technically an autologous stem cell transplant).

This book is for others living through a journey with cancer. and those in the business of delivering health care like doctors, med students, nurses, and medical administrators.

You can buy it now via CreateSpace (my preference) and Amazon. You can also get the eBook via Amazon (and Amazon Unlimited).

Mary Ghikas
Senior Associate Executive Director
ALA
312-280-2518
mghikas@ala.org
CHICAGO — The American Library Association has consciously and vigorously embraced the position that libraries of all types are the locus of community engagement. As the facilitator of the first round of Midwinter Conversations, R. David Lankes, professor at Syracuse iSchool, knows first-hand ALA’s commitment to community engagement and to turning outward.

Through Lankes’ generosity, ALA members and United for Libraries members are being given the opportunity to access for free Lankes’ book “Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today’s Complex World.” Download this book for free or read it through Medium by going to the following webpage: http://quartz.syr.edu/blog/?page_id=4598. Also included are brief videos explaining specific concepts and providing practical examples.

R. David Lankes is a professor and Dean’s Scholar for the New Librarianship at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and director of the Information Institute of Syracuse. Lankes is a passionate advocate for libraries and their essential role in today’s society. He also seeks to understand how information approaches and technologies can be used to transform industries. In this capacity he has served on advisory boards and study teams in the fields of libraries, telecommunications, education, and transportation including at the National Academies. He has been a visiting fellow at the National Library of Canada, the Harvard School of Education, and the first fellow of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy. His book “The Atlas of New Librarianship,” co-published by the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, and MIT Press, won the 2012 ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Award for the Best Book in Library Literature.

I had a great time talking about the future of libraries and general issues of open access and the importance of librarians with the Nerd Absurd podcasting crew. It is a long conversation, but pretty free wheeling, have a listen:

The British Columbia Libraries put on an incredible event highlighting innovation in libraries and challenging librarians, politicians, administrators, and citizens to think different about libraries and impact. They have now put online videos from the summit and they are well worth the time:

“Lankes provides a cogent view of the best libraries of today and how they will move into the future. He focuses both on the librarians and their role in their communities (and less on their role as keepers of books or their surrogates) and on libraries as places for learning (and less on their function as book museums). It’s a brief, inspirational and breezy read and a great introduction to his larger work The Atlas of New Librarianship (MIT, 2011)”